In response to one of the constant claims about the Zend Framwork - that it's large and bloated - Juozas Kaziukenas tries to dispel three things that people use to reinforce this belief.

Zend Framework is always considered as being the slow/bloated one. I don't think this is right, so I decided to prove that it's not correct and in fact ZF is as good as other frameworks are. This post doesn't cover any benchmarks though; this is more like a architecture review and some misconceptions disproof.

He counters the following with a bit of logic that makes the points a bit more shaky than they first seem:

Large installation footprint

Unnecessary features

Use more system resources

If you're still not convinced, he offers two other tips to help streamline your Zend Framework install - profiling to find the bottlenecks and using Zend_Application sparingly as it can be a bit of a resource problem.